Greta Thunberg and her Freedom Flotilla friends clearly don’t know much about international law. Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly allows a state to withhold humanitarian aid from an enemy combatant under certain conditions. To wit:
The obligation of a High Contracting Party to allow the free passage of the consignments [humanitarian aid] indicated in the preceding paragraph is subject to the condition that this Party is satisfied that there are no serious reasons for fearing:
(a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination,
(b) that the control may not be effective, or
(c) that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy through the substitution of the above-mentioned consignments for goods which would otherwise be provided or produced by the enemy or through the release of such material, services or facilities as would otherwise be required for the production of such goods.
Hamas does “divert aid from its [intended] destination.” Much of that aid is “diverted” from the people of Gaza to Hamas. Until now “control” of the distribution has been nearly nonexistent. Hamas does have a “definite advantage to accrue to it” when its fighters know they can take vast quantities of the aid for themselves and their families, which helps Hamas sustain its men, and even gain new recruits. And Hamas sells much of the aid it steals to the Gazans who were supposed to have received the aid for free.
In other words, all three of the permissible reasons for withholding humanitarian aid, as set out in the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 23, have been met. Would someone make sure Greta Thunberg is sent a link to Article 23? She might even read it.
Brendan O’Neill takes her to task for her latest cause, and the malignancy of her attack on the tiny, embattled Jewish state that is now fighting a seven-front war for its survival, here: “Greta Thunberg’s moral siege of Israel,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, May 7, 2025:
People talk about the siege of Gaza but few are prepared to reckon with the siege of Israel. For years, the Jewish State has been subjected to a double siege. There’s the physical siege by the armies of antisemites that surround it and which dream of its obliteration. And there’s the moral siege by the intellectuals of the West. By our credentialed classes, our activist set, our literary elites, all of whom increasingly derive their fantasy of virtue from their hostility to the Jewish nation. And some of whom also dream of its destruction. ‘From the river to sea’, they cry, to let the world know that their utopia is a Middle East with no Jewish homeland.
Yes, seemingly all of a sudden, since the atrocities of October 7, 2023, when six thousand members of Hamas, accompanied by a few hundred civilians who wanted to join in the fun, smashed into Israel from Gaza and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap 251 others, antisemites have been having a field day. Israel has become the object of nonstop vilification, and many people, from campus brownshirts to UN officials, have no problem demanding that “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free,” which can mean only one thing: Israel must be destroyed, in order to be replaced by a 23rd Arab state. As for the Israelis themselves, those who are not killed in the fighting that will undoubtedly ensue must be expelled.
Brendan O’Neill, not for the first time, has given Greta Thunberg the drubbing she deserves. But don’t worry. She’ll be in the news again very soon. She has been formally diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, and from here on out, her obsession will be the mighty empire of Israel that has been, in her view, the source of so much woe. She hasn’t a syllable to spare for the mass famine in Sudan, or Pakistan’s aggression against India, or the murders of Alawites and Druze in Syria, or Russia’s war against Ukraine. For Greta Thunberg, it’s all the way with “globalize the Intifada” and “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho/The IDF has got to go.”
Don’t forgive her, Lord. She knows exactly what she is doing.
Pray Hard says
And, she’s getting of an age wherein she can’t claim the stupidity of childhoos.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Precisely! Actually she’s been fair game for quite a while, but particularly now!
I’m interested in one thing: has she been one of those people hating on Teslas?
Wellington says
She is certainly a facilitator of evil. Whether she is evil herself is open to question.
And for the record, she has been as wrong about so-called man-made climate change as she has been about the realities of the Middle East. Indeed, I challenge anyone to convince me that Thunberg has been correct about man-made climate change though wrong about the Middle East (N.B., correlation studies and computer model projections are all the man-made climate change crowd have going for them and one knows or should know by now that neither constitutes true scientific evidence and each has a notorious track record for accuracy). Meanwhile, the Antarctic has built up, quite recently, an additional 500,000 square miles of ice, approximately twice the size of Texas—but I digress..
I see a pattern. Yes I do. Man-made climate change is as bogus as such crap as a “Gaza genocide” as well as men being capable of giving birth and Covid coming from a wet market and Biden being just fine cognitively, et al. Indeed, one should reflect upon someone being so correct about one thing while so wrong about another. Usually, it doesn’t “work” this way. And not here with the dear Greta.
James Lincoln says
Wellington says,
“Man-made climate change is as bogus as such crap as a “Gaza genocide”
Just a few years back, I was still on the fence about “man-made climate change.”
Not now.
The climate is indeed changing, but I am not now buying the “man-made” part.
gravenimage says
Regarding Israel, Greta Thunberg Knows Exactly What She Is Doing
……………………………………..
Thunberg is not just a clueless naif–she’s a nasty piece of work. I gave her the benefit of the doubt for a couple of years, but no more.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Yeah, as Pray Hard noted above, she’s no longer a kid. If she skipped school and knows nothing about the issues, be it climate change or Gaza, then she should simply shut up! Or she can keep yakking away, and other people should just see her as a female, European version of David Hogg
Westman says
Does anyone sense that Greta is being used up by causes which will leave her alone and bypassed by life’s rewards of her own family, healthy relationships, and stability in old age?
Watching her be used is like the past viewing of President Biden being used in his dotage as the auto-signer cranked out the orders of others. Like Biden, Greta likely thinks the ideas coming from her lips are her own.
Bret says
The left will use anyone to further their agenda until they are all used up. Greta, who jumps on whatever bandwagon passes her and soon Hogg will be forgotten by the left as they then spend decades trying to be relevant again.
Infidel lives matter says
The very powerful people who pull her strings continue to get exactly what they want: To have the focus on that silly little brat instead of themselves.
jerry glenn says
Worthless twit.
Classic Jeffersonian Liberal says
Greta Thunberg: Second only to AOC in my heart!